Announcements

Google Summer of Code : What to do with your summer vacation"The openSUSE project recently announced that it was selected as one of the 150 mentoring organizations for Google’s Summer of Code. In addition, the Mono project, another Novell sponsored open source initiative, announced that it will be participating in this great annual program. The Google Summer of Code helps student developers earn cash while contributing to open source projects.The deadline for students to get involved is this Friday, April 3. Go here for more information."

openSUSE Project at LinuxExpo in Prague"The openSUSE Project is bringing the green to Prague in April! The openSUSE Project will have a booth, demos, and several presentations at the LinuxExpo in Prague, April 15 and 16th at the Hotel Olympik Artemis. LinuxExpo is billed as the largest exhibition and conference for Linux and FOSS in Central Europe. VIP entry to the Expo is CZK 1,300, or CZK 1,200 if you register on the Web site. Other prices apply to one day entry, or for passes that don't come with materials and lunch."

Novell OpenPR Blog: Maybe it’s time to give Linux a try"There’s been a lot of buzz the past couple of days about a Windows-only virus that has hit the Internet – the Conficker worm. Expected to be un-leashed tomorrow, on April 1, the potential damage the virus might cause is still unknown, but it’s enough to keep users up at night worrying! Though there is a patch for the virus, and while nothing at all might happen, there are an estimated 10 million infected PCs with Conficker and this is by no means is the only virus out there that threatens Windows machines. It’s estimated that computer viruses are constantly being introduced at a rate of thousands per day, as reported in a recent, and much discussed, 60 Minutes broadcast on computer virus threats."

In the Community

Joe Brockmeier: How to make technology conferences suck less"There’s a dirty little secret to technology conferences: Most of them suck to some degree. It’s about time someone started thinking about how to make conference time more valuable and less stale, especially now that companies are cutting back on travel to shows. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. We just announced the openSUSE Contributor’s Conference for this fall, and I’m on the presentation committee for OpenSource World and LinuxCon this year. After seeing Danese Cooper’s post about designing better conferences, I was finally moved to write about it. Cooper says: ..."

Status Updates

Distribution

Vincent Untz: A look forward at GNOME 3.0"It's been a long time coming, but if the proposal that was presented at GUADEC caught your attention and if you're curious to know more about GNOME 3.0, you will definitely want to read the detailed planning that the release team prepared. While the GUADEC proposal was mainly about the idea of doing GNOME 3.0, we also hoped that it would bootstrap a new period where people would begin serious planning about it. And it did happened: before, people tended to only propose ideas on paper; after GUADEC, we started seeing more concrete roadmaps, proposals and code."

Joe Brockmeier: iFolder: Come and Get It!"Today we announced (officially) that iFolder code has been pushed out and we have a new iFolder Web site. So, you can grab the source code from SourceForge immediately. We’re working on packages for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1, and there’s work being done to put iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service as well. Of course, there’s lots to be done. The new iFolder site needs some love, and we’re working on getting iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service, packaged for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 (and later) and generally turning it into a kick-ass project. ..."

Build Service

Wiki / Communication / Events

openSUSE News: openSUSE Conference Set for September 17-20 in Nuremberg"The openSUSE Project will be having its first full-on contributor’s conference this September in beautiful Nuremberg, Germany. There’s still a lot of planning to be done, but we want to get the word out that the conference will take place from September 17 through September 20. Mark your calendars, buy your tickets, and start packing…"

openSUSE News: Google Summer of Code Update"If you’re still thinking about submitting an application for the openSUSE Project (or, actually, any project) for Google Summer of Code - the deadline is Friday, April 3rd at 19:00 UTC. However, please don’t wait until the last minute! Leslie Hawthorn has sent out the following to the GSoC mentor’s list:..."

Tips and Tricks

Gabriel Stein: Python and built-in functions"Today we will learn about built-in functions in Python. But, what is built-in functions Gabriel? simple. A built-in function is a set of functions already included in python to help developers with basic operations. The first built-in function is range. This function shows a range of values between two numbers like (x,x+n). For example, lets look the first range which we know: between the numbers 1 to 10."

Thunderbird and Enigmail Integration"Sharing information has always been something I felt was important. Knowing the source of data one receives is also important. Setting up Thunderbird to provide the ability to sign data in a non-repudiated way is easier than it sounds like it should be. Doing so lets those who receive what you post/send/publish know it came from you and not another posing as you."

Gabriel Stein: Python and Fibonacci"Well, some posts ago I received a comment asking by the meaning of fibonacci, and now is time to explain fibonacci and learn more python. OK, I will admit. In the first part of this post, I will be a lazy guy. Below the wikipedia definition of Fibonacci(but don’t worry, I will continue):..."

Katarina Machalkova: Customize your partitioner (+ let's go graphical)"I must admit I've been waiting with this post until today, the reason being that it is not supposed to be 1st April joke, like for example this one (thanks, captain Arvin, you really made me laugh) :D As you probably noticed, for openSUSE 11.2 our goal is to significantly improve usability of YaST partitioner. I want to show you a feature that is in partitioner for quite some time already, yet it is quite little known. It helps you to customize the partitioner to best suit your needs. ..."

Planet SUSE

Miguel de Icaza: Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0 released"We just released two big projects we have been working on for quite a while. Mono 2.4 is a much faster, scalable and tuned version of Mono, like you have never seen before. Major highlights from the previous release are documented in our release notes."

Arvin Schnell: YaST and Compiz during Installation"We (Thomas Göttlicher, J. Daniel Schmidt and Arvin Schnell) have use all our remaining ITO for this really cool feature. Normally compiz (more precisely the cube module) shows each desktop on the surface of a cuboid. Since we don’t have several desktops during installation we decided to show the “wizard” steps on the cuboid. Pressing “Next” or “Back” rotates the cuboid around the y-axis..."

Jeff Jaffe: SLE 11 - Open Source Innovation Continues"Last week, Novell unleashed SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 11 at the Open Source Business Conference. The major focus of the announcement was the business value provided by the latest and greatest Linux operating system. With SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Novell is providing value in several key areas:..."

Ben Kevan: KDE 4.2.2 Released"The KDE team today announced the release of KDE 4.2.2. Here’s what they had on their site: KDE Community Ships Second Translation and Service Release of the 4.2 Free Desktop, Containing Numerous Bugfixes, Performance Improvements and Translation Updates."

Gabriel Stein: Review :: SuSe Studio"Well, I really did. Some posts ago I talked about SuSe Studio, and I said something about a more detailed post. Here we go! There’s a gallery above, with 22 pictures of SuSe Studio. Please read the text and navigate into the gallery. Lets start with the first picture, the first screen after the login(you can use openID, Google…) is a “Appliance Status”. At this screen you will have your created appliances, and a option to create a new appliance. Novell did very well, and give to us 15GB of disk space!!"

How useful do You Find beagle?"Possibly one of the most controversial applications ever and I find myself chomping at the bit with this one, trying not to make derogatory comments about Dogs! "

Passing Arrays to a Script?"From Question to Solution. I don't even pretend to understand all this, it's just not my field at all. But it's nice when forum members can help each other come up with a Solution!"

On the Web

Kevin Dupuy: The *real* antidote to Conficker…"I’m almost as sick of this Conficker stuff as I am going to be sick of April Fools Day stuff when I wake up tomorrow (not to mention I think this is a big promotional stunt for a movie called ‘Conficker’ coming out soon. You watch!), but I have to laugh when I see all these mainstream news organizations falling all over themselves to tell people how to get rid of this malware. In reality, all you have to tell your friends and family is to use one product that will protect them from Conficker and future viruses..."

Miguel de Icaza: Microsoft releases ASP.NET under the MS-PL License"Miguel de IcazaMicrosoft's ASP.NET MVC is an extension built on the core of ASP.NET that brings some of the popular practices and ease of development that were popularized by Ruby on Rails and Django to the .NET developers. Scott Guthrie ---the inventor of ASP.NET--- just announced that Microsoft is open sourcing the ASP.NET MVC stack under the MS-PL license: ..."

Localization

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